The Where We Were

View overlooking downtown Xoxlac

As a team we'd read about Xoxlac, saw it on the map and looked at a small photo or two on the advanced information provided by Hands for Peacemaking.   But of course we really wouldn't get a true sense of the place until we were there, on the ground and could see this northern Mayan village for ourselves.

Town jail

Downtown Xoxlac consists of four churches, a crude play yard, a school compound and a health clinic. There are a couple of Tiendas (small roadside stores that sell mostly junk food like chips and pop). If you know what you're looking for you can look up the hill and see the town jail - a tiny, low-slung building where they will throw in chronic drunks or other miscreants for a few hours or, depending on the severity of the crime, up to a day or two. If that doesn't do the trick the offender will face the whole town on the next offense where they will beat him or her silly. I got the feeling there isn't a court of law, attorneys or the like. Call it the Xoxlac justice system.  The town is generally peaceful, and you can't buy alcohol there, so its jail doesn't get much use.

Turkey on the hill

Just up another hill overlooking the village is a compound where some of the women and teen girls bring their corn each morning to be ground. There's a guy who has a little gas-powered grinder and for a few Quezels he can spare them the labor-itensive process of hand-grinding the meal, which is used primarily for tortillas. The line was fairly long the morning Larry and I climbed up to look inside the grinding shack. We were met along the way by a big tom turkey, suitable for any Thanksgiving table.

Mr. Corn Grinder helps a client with his mean grinding machine

Here's how to get to get to Xoxlac: Find the city of Barillas, wind your way through narrow, crazy streets and around the street vendors while avoiding dogs and pedestrians, until you're on the other side of town. Climb the hill past the old coffee plant that was hit in the middle of the night by a devastating mudslide last fall, killing 11, and just keep going. You'll pass through many small villages along the way and the roads, save a few places where paved, will just keep getting worse. If you make a wrong turn you'll probably land in Mexico, possibly in the hands of the cartel drug traffickers known to frequent other parts of northern Guatemala. (We were told this wasn't a concern in our particular region).

Eventually you'll see a gravel road that cuts sharply to the left and up. Take that. Drive another hour or so, passing a huge tree on the right growing out of a deep valley, past the areas where the locals have supplanted corn on the slopes where trees once stood.  Shortly after seeing a scrawny dog standing on a big berm you'll reach a T-intersection.

Scrawny dog on the berm

Go right for another couple of miles and you're there. Oh, I should mention that if you don't have a sturdy four-wheel drive vehicle or a big dirt bike you probably won't make it as there are too many serious hills to climb and rocks to jump over. Someone in our group compared the drive to Xoxlac to one of those Ford truck or Jeep commercials where they are trying to prove the toughness of their latest model. Only more so. Pastor Jon waggishly described the road as a "no nose picker." Rueben called it pure "shake and bake." Three of our team (Larry, Maxx and John) chose to make the long trip standing in the back of a Toyota pickup.  They have my greatest admiration, and hopefully their chiropractors' as well.

We were told that each morning around 1 a.m. a pickup truck with a standing rack passes through Xoxlac and other villages and as many as 30 people will climb in the back to make the long bumpy ride to Barillas for shopping, work and the like. I wouldn't have believed this, except one morning I awoke to the sounds of voices outside, dogs barking and then a truck rumbling through.

On his first trip to Xoxlac a few years ago, our host, Marco, had to unexpectedly spend the night after his hefty Landcruiser got stuck in the mud on the trip out.  It poured all night, pelting the tin roof on his makeshift lodging in the school house so he didn't sleep. The next morning he had to walk five hours to a distant village to meet his help. Worried his wife sick as she'd been expecting him home. Marco has a winch for his vehicle now in case this ever happens again, but it has yet to be installed.